Comment welcomed and all stuff works in progress.

(Lou) Just to say Marc that I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts from a Japanese perspective. International Bowerbird!

Critical Pedagogy Idea (abstract for a journal article proposal)

Reflections on using a self-determined learning (cite) and open pedagogy (cite) model with learners in a private Japanese university. The context is a ‘Language and Culture’ course within a Global Communication (English) course, where learners from overseas join a class where the classroom language is L2 English and the majority of the learners are L1 speakers of Japanese. I, the instructor-reporter, have decided to forego a simple, ‘politically neutral’ course that looks wholly at Eurocentric cultural issues or at English as a Lingua Franca purely for neoliberal purposes; rather, he has taken up structuralist and post-structuralist thoughts on language in order for learners to examine their attitudes and beliefs about language, it's purpose for them within society and within communities, how they interact with racio-linguistic prescriptivism within an undergraduate language programme, and how they engage critically with multilingualism as individuals within global capitalism.

For many learners it is the first time that they have been tasked with engaging critically with both their own culture as well as calling into question the ontology of ‘English-speaking culture’ and ‘global communication’, as opposed to consumption of cultural source material which provides little opportunity for construction or seizure of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1982). Additionally, it is the first time for many of the learners to engage with studies where the banking model (Freire, 1982?) is avoided, while cooperative group work is used not as a classroom convenience but as a model for scaffolding change within individuals.

I reflect upon the successes, failures, affordances and obstacles within the course and the ways in which the learners have chosen to (dis)engage with examinations of English L2 extrinsic motivational factors (Dörnyei, 2013?) and neoliberal discourses regarding ELF.

Comments

Love it Marc - can't wait to read and find out more. I have a (much more shallow) experience of going to India on a sort of mini lecture tour - fun at first and then after a while my critical sense kicked in and I started to think, what am I doing here? Playing into uncritical acceptance of English as a linguafranca with young people on undergraduate programmes who thought they'd get work at Western universities. They'd been sold something at these expensive private universities which wasn't true...

Hi (Sarah). I love the way your idea supports students to consider language as a cultural construct - and it is hugely interesting - it makes me consider from my own perspective how international students might consider their acquisition of (English) language works in relation to wider ideas of cultural capital - is English still needed in a world of google translate? If not, why is it still a global language of import? Hugely interesting - I hope you write more.